Um, Mr. Boot...

This, then, is the choice confronting Republican primary voters in 2016: Whether to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling....

[L]ong experience shows that America has been most successful in achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fostered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objectives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops have sought to achieve.

Of the successes, Grenada is not 'Reaganesque' but actually Reagan's policy.

The close second of the successes is Panama, which his former Vice President did. So the two examples of 'occasional' successes of the Jacksonian type are the two most Reaganesque successful policies.

The commitment to long stays are all someone else's, whether successes or failures. Germany and Japan are Trumanesque, and were already long solidified by the time Reagan got there. South Korea is much the same. Bosnia and Kosovo are Bill Clinton's projects, well after Reagan had retired from the stage.

Among the failures, Clinton's were Haiti and Somalia. The Iraq pullout was Obama's decision.

Lebanon is the only one of the failures that can be laid at Reagan's door, and that mission was a United Nations force. Reagan withdrew at the same time as the French, who made up a strong component without which we'd have had to have committed forces much more heavily to a conflict in which our local allies were collapsing. If the argument is that we should have made an Iraq out of it, OK, but there's no reason to suggest that such a policy would have been "Reaganesque." What Reagan himself chose to do was the opposite.

Reagan himself took a Jacksonian approach in Grenada and won; his VP later became President and did the same thing in Panama, and won. Reagan took the internationalist approach favored by Bill Clinton in Lebanon and lost. Perhaps he could have won if he'd doubled down, but that isn't what he himself chose to do.

So the most obviously "Reaganesque" policy really is the Jacksonian policy. Reagan kept his Long, Twilight conflict cold, and used hot war only when victory could be had quickly or when there was a large international coalition backing the play. George H. W. Bush did the same thing -- Panama, but also the Gulf War with its huge international coalition. The other policies may be wise or foolish, but they aren't "Reaganesque."

8 comments:

Ymar Sakar
said...

Democrat occupation and long warmonger ish type policies require a Loyal Opposition party. That's why when people like Nixon or Bush II attempt to close the war, a result of Democrat foreign policy, they tend to step on land mines and get annihilated, sooner or later.

Democrats only allow other Democrats to continue their war policy. It was a decision made by their bureaucracy priesthood during Vietnam. Before then, they allowed Republicans to "hold the line" for whatever reason. Keep the ship on course, on a Democrat foreign policy course or Korea.

If a Republican or even an anti Leftist, decides to steer a different course and wishes to rely upon a Loyal Opposition that calls themselves the Democrat party, they will get the same thing the people in Benghazi got.

Hussein has shown another mutation and upgrading of Leftist controlled foreign policy. It used to be the Democrats only cared to get Americans killed if they could blame it on a Republican leader or power. Now that they have the power, they're still getting Americans intentionally killed, except there doesn't appear to be any particular fall guy for it, other than some State Department false flag op that funded an internet video just so they could claim it as a pretense for something.

This data point should have suggested to certain individuals that this is nearing the End Game, as developments proceed.

Of the successes, Grenada is not 'Reaganesque' but actually Reagan's policy.

One reason that quick exit from Grenada was a success was that the Marxist government had been in operation for only a few years, so undoing it was not as difficult as it was to undo 40 years of Baathist government in Iraq, or generations of failure in Haiti.

You know why we did so well in Grenada? There's one person who bears the credit above all others, and her name is Linda Flohr. I happen to have the honor of knowing her, who was at the time a member of the CIA's clandestine service -- this is no secret now. She's the one who made sure the right photographs of defenses were in our hands, and who smuggled paint to the hostages so they could mark their buildings for the rescue operators.

If you look her up, you'll find her condemned for Iran-Contra and the Iraq war's so-called falsified intelligence. So we treat our heroes, and our heroines.

The Athenians also sacrificed their manpower for fleeting political glories. Themistocles had issues domestically, enemies who glorified themselves over Athens and Greece. Socrates, as expected. Also generals in the Peloponessian War, who failed to deliver results, even as Athenian cowards with the votes sabotaged the war with restrictions. Those got publicly scape goated, like the Admiral at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack, even though FDR had intel and just happened not to pass it along.

The Left were always planning to do the Iran Contra they only imagined their enemies had done, except with more intent, better results, killing Americans directly. That element of projection, on the individual and policy level, is very SOP for the Leftist alliance.

A nation that eventually uses up their great people, will no longer have any in the right positions. They got rid of them all, and that nation deserves what happens next.

Impressive, and also ironic. The audience reaction, happy go lucky, conformist individuals that were a product of the oligopolies of WWI and WWII, Leftist inventions in all but name.

Things are different when the threat is much closer and eminent. The very atmosphere is different. Even for those Americans that wanted to fight communism, they did not understand that the US system after 1950, was already half Communist Totalitarian to begin with. The levers of power had been shifted and sabotaged.

I keep telling people that Obama's decision to pull out of Iraq was akin to pulling out of Japan or Europe in 1954. Bush put the country on a multi-generational engagement in Iraq that Obama reneged on. Meh, it's a republic, it happens.